 I don't make things for museums or for art collectors. And if you think that what I'm saying is bullshit, immediately change the channel and do something else. Do you want to build a rocket ship but don't have the deep pockets of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Richard Branson? You might want to turn to the Rocket Factory, a trans-dimensional manufacturing plant created by artist Tom Sacks, in which you can build and own a personalized rocket in both the physical and virtual world. The project is one of the most inventive uses of NFTs, a groundbreaking technology that makes digital items one of a kind by giving them a unique code that can't be duplicated or forged. The Rocket Factory builds on previous themes in Sacks's work, such as creating painstakingly realistic reproductions of familiar objects, and in a nod to Andy Warhol referencing popular brands and companies. Long obsessed with spaceflight, he's also created three different space program installations, each of which contemplates what it means to fly to the moon, Mars, and beyond. Sacks's art makes use of the new form of digital commons called the blockchain, which is the shared public database that makes it possible to prove that you and you alone own an NFT. Of the metaverse, the 3D virtual world where some believe a great deal of human interaction will soon be migrating, and of our persistent longing for a new frontier, all of which are characteristics of what is often called Web 3.0, the next phase in the evolution of the internet. Reason spoke with Sacks in his Manhattan studio about the role of psychedelics in his creative process, how the internet has radically flattened and improved the relationship between artist and audience, and why his meticulously handcrafted NFT rockets can be just as exciting, innovative, and inspiring as the ones made by Bezos, Musk, and Branson. Tom Sacks, thanks for talking to reason. Thanks, Nick. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Let's start by discussing your ongoing Rocket Factory project, which is one of the most interesting NFT projects going. Can you describe it briefly? The Rocket Factory is a multi-dimensional art project. So we've got components in the NFT world, but also components in physical space. You get an NFT of a nose cone and a body and a tail assembly, and then you come burn them, which is you combine three NFTs into one assembled rocket, and you select a launch date. I get a notification. I build that rocket that you designed and launch it, return it to you, or you can opt to have it donated to the museum or shredded. That's the essence of the project. Three, two, one. And the different components exist on OpenSea, the NFT auction site. You can go to OpenSea and buy them, but you can also go to our own platform, Tom Sacks Rocket Factory. It's got everything, and we created a user experience that's more friendly. And the nose cone, the body, and the tail fin, they're branded in different ways, right? So you call the rockets that are all one brand. That's called a perfect rocket, and then there's Frankenrockets, where people mix and match. So they kind of create their own unique rocket. First off, tell me what's the percentage of people who buy them, who go with the perfect rocket versus the Frankenrockets? Surprisingly, it's about 50-50 Frankenrockets versus perfect rockets. They're 30 brands, and those are the brands of my life. I prefer a Frankenrocket because I think it's more personal, and this project is kind of a generative art project in that the community decides. In fact, one of the things that's complex about this project, I do paintings of the NFTs, but I only do paintings of rockets that other people have assembled in this space. So they assemble Brian Griffin and Lisa Simpson and Budweiser Rocket. I thought you were going to go with Trojan there, but I think it's better to stick with Budweiser. It could be Trojan, but then our marketplace assigns a name to that that I've selected. I pick what I paint, but it's important that the community decides because I'm interested in community. This is one of the many things that's thrilling about the NFT space, is all the wonderful people that I've met and continue to engage with, and people can participate and have a sense of true ownership of the social activity of that project. How many rockets have been sold, like reconborn so far, and is there an upper limit on the number of rockets that are available? So there are 3,000 components that have been minted to a maximum possibility of 1,000 rockets. So far, we've launched a couple hundred, and there are probably 500 that have been assembled, but there's still a lot of opportunity out there to assemble and launch rockets. What's it cost, you know, generally to put one together? And are the NFTs being auctioned, or is there a set price? So the NFTs, 80% of them were for claims, so people got them for 0.15 ETH. Which is worth a lot less today than it was a year ago. It's true, but it's still worth more than it was when they were claimed. That's right. I mean, there's the NFT that gets minted. It's the launch of the physical rocket that you make after an NFT is minted or comborned, and then there's the video of the launch. So in a way, there are three dimensions of the project, the physical rocket, the NFT, and the video. These all become one. I don't draw a distinction value between one or another, but I think what's important to me is that these are different realities, the physical reality that you and I are in right now, the metaverse, which is just as real, it just has different qualities. You know, I'm a devout scientist, I say Hale Sagan, but I also believe in the power of magic, because we practice it every day in the studio. The form of magic that I practice is called sympathetic magic, which is like a fancy or anthropological term for if you build it, they will come. A lot of your previous work is about the meticulous attention to detail and hand crafting of things that might appear to be produced at an industrial scale. You've done things that are kind of growing out of a borehole tradition of hand making, like artisanal Heinz boxes or Brillo boxes, things like that. What's going on when you take that much care to produce something and then to show that it's constructed, it's not naturally occurring? I will make something that represents a piece of consumer crap, but I'll make it with 10,000 hours of love. But you'll see its wood, and you'll see its glue drips, and you'll see the screws and pencil marks. I mean, if you hold your iPhone up in your hand, it's arguably the best thing ever made, yet there's no evidence that a human being was involved with any of it. And it aspires to that, even in the software. I could never do that, and yet Apple could never make anything as shitty as the things that I make. I mean, this is the advantage that the artist has over industry. The artist can tell the story of the individual. The artist can say, I was there. I existed. When I pushed my thumb into a piece of ceramic, that fingerprint will be there in 50,000 years. Yeah, can I ask, one of the things I think is striking about your art activity, for lack of a better term, is not only what you're producing, but then the way you engage your audience, or your buyers, or people who are interested. This seems to be quite different than the way that somebody like a Picasso, or even in a way a Duchamp. They were Zeus at the top of Mount Olympus, and they were just issuing Thunderbolts or something. You seem to be more on the same level as your audience. Yeah, well, I make the art for me and my team. There are 20 people that work here. And the team today includes you. And the team today includes all the viewers and listeners. And if you think that what I'm saying is bullshit, immediately change the channel and do something else. But if you're listening to these words, it means that you believe enough in what we're talking about that you're interested in what we're doing. I don't make things for museums or for art collectors. And I don't care if it's a painting, or a sculpture, or a sneaker, or a movie, or an NFT project. It all has the same value, and I build them all to the same standards. So, you know, the internet is about dispersion of power, decentralization of knowledge, things like that. Do you feel like the internet and blockchain is delivering on its promise of a kind of radical diffusion throughout a system of information and of knowledge and of possibilities? Well, it's all happening so quickly, and there's so much hype around it. It's hard to remove that. What I've been learning about Web 3, and like, what Web 3 to me means is ownership, is that you have a wallet and that you have identity. But, you know, it's about user interface, because I'm interested in telepathy and breaking down, like, I want this computer, like, I can't wait until this thing lives inside my asshole. Like, I want this physically thing to go away. I think it probably is already there, but it hasn't been turned on yet, right? Can I bring it back to kind of, you know, talking about, you know, kind of the internet and things like that, you know, the internet is democratizing on a certain level, like in art. And is that preceding a pace, and is that a good thing, where, you know, everybody kind of gets a say? Yeah. Well, you know, I don't really believe in people having a say about how to make my art. Right. But I do believe in the democratization of art in that art should be more accessible, and that elite ideas don't need to be just for the elite. The best art means different things to different people. But if art has too much of a political agenda, it becomes propaganda, which I have tremendous respect for propaganda and advertising. It's just not what I do. Are art markets, do they function, you know, like markets for soybean and corn, or are they kind of fake markets, or can we even draw those distinctions? Well, I mean, I guess, like, the main difference between those is, like, the soybeans and corns are commodities markets, so it's like just a soybean. But art isn't kind of art. I mean, we don't want to say it is, but, you know, it's kind of a commodity. Well, I mean, I don't want to be semantic and a total dick about it, but, like, every artist is different, and every art piece is different. It's a little bit like comparing Bitcoin with an NFT, and that when you buy a Bitcoin, and you sell a Bitcoin, it doesn't matter which Bitcoin you got, but an NFT at 100% matters which NFT you bought or sold. I mean, it's interesting. With something like an NFT, what's great about it is that in the contract, you can build in IP that doesn't exist in the meat space world of art, right? Where, you know, when you sell a painting or a sculpture, the person who buys it can do whatever they want with it. Well, an NFT? No, it's the same. We have the same IP rules. Like, you buy a painting, you don't own the rights to use it. I still own those rights. To use it? Well, to exploit its image for profit. Oh, okay. Like, I do a painting, you can't make a t-shirt of it and sell that t-shirt, if that's what you mean. Oh, right, okay. And that's the way it's always been with us. That's how you sell, yeah. And I think most artists do that. But you're not crazy to say what you just said. I think some artists do sell their IP and other people don't protect it. Although I benefit from the concept of intellectual property, I don't believe in it. Why not? Ideas are cheap. It's all about execution. Just because I thought it up doesn't mean I'm better. It's all about who brings it first to the market. And I think that's, I mean, the whole concept of patents is only like 200 years old. And so the Chinese not believing in intellectual property makes total sense. Well, you're singing a libertarian song now, Open Borders, questioning IP. These are all great things. And I'm going to jump to another thing, which is ketamine therapy. Ketamine is, depending on who you talk to, it's a psychedelic or psychedelic adjacent drug that's legal in the United States. What do you get out of ketamine therapy? Ketamine therapy is like a safer version of acid. But when done safely and in a sufficiently high dose, it can take you to another dimension, another place where you can see the world from a different perspective. And that's been very valuable to me, especially as we're, it's really what it's really done, though, to be honest, it hasn't opened my mind up as much as it has helped me to articulate ideas and experiences that have been beyond my ability to express them. For example, under a extremely high dose recently, I was able to see my death very clearly. And it wasn't so much like a car wreck or anything violent, but I was able to understand myself without my ego and without the attachment of my body. So I was able to see the entire interconnectedness of the universe in kind of like a sci-fi Carl Sagan way and that we're all stardust. I've always believed that any two things in the world are connected by a third one. Finding that third thing is pretty hard and that's what art does. But if you can understand that as an essential problem, you can try and solve it. Like in the studio, we believe one plus one equals a million. In school, we learned one plus one equals two, but that's Apollonian thinking. That's logic-based. One plus one equals a million is more Dionysian. It's more embracing intuition. And it's through intuition that we make some of our greatest discoveries, whether it's in art or science, like trusting our subconscious. And the ketamine experiences that I've done have been more explorations into those, like kind of a forced dream state or a place where I could connect. Let me run through some phrases that kind of surround you or flood around you. You know, give me a quick explanation of what you're talking about. One is showing up is all that matters. Absolutely. I mean, making art is an athletic enterprise. You've got to do your push-ups or your layups or whatever it is. Drawings, touching clay every day. We do this thing output before input. Before you look at your phone first thing in the morning, touch clay right in your journal, sing, dance. Do anything out of your mind so that you connect to your subconscious. Creativity is the enemy. Yeah. Be extremely narrow and possible. Do as little as possible every time. Build incrementally outward. If you add something new and capricious, it could spoil that. It's like chili pepper. Too much chili pepper will ruin the dish, but a little bit just makes it fantastic. So, like, creativity is the enemy and use it only when absolutely necessary. Just build on the last thing so that it grows organically. We think we become. Well, that's the slogan of the Rocket Factory. And that is make the world the way you want it to be, not the way it is. And here's one that'll need a little bit more explanation, I think. Always be no-ling, K-N-O-L-L-I-N-G. So, no-ling is a process of organizing like things in 90 degrees or parallel lines. It's a method of organization. It's not really cleaning up after yourself, but it's kind of straightening things out. So, it gives your mind a little place to survey your workspace. It allows your mind to do some busy work and your subconscious, like the dream thing, to work on the issues. And usually, your subconscious can solve it. When you've got writer's block, it's because you're getting too jammed up and psycho about it. You just got to let go. What is the next stage of the Rocket Factory project? So, all rocket holders will receive a ticket to join the mothership in Earth orbit. The mothership will travel from Earth to Mars. The mothership will send landers down to Mars. Landers will collect Mars rocks. And those rocks will become NFTs. You'll get an NFT for doing the mining mission. And those Mars rocks will have all kinds of different elements inside of them that will eventually be refined into rocket fuel. And some of those elements are more valuable than others. Some of the things we're talking about are diamonds, peanut butter, deer scat, corn, gold, uranium. There's all kinds of things. And each of those things has different values for creating our own brew of rocket fuel. And that rocket fuel will be used to take those rockets to another world in search of life. The only thing we'll leave it at that. All right. Well, we'll leave it there. I'm Sax. Thanks for talking. Thanks, Nick. Thanks for having me.